Comments on: Humanities Coding/Hacking

By: miriam.posner

miriam.posner — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:41:26 +0000

I also vote for the hack-oriented session! I’d love to do some hands-on stuff.

By: ethics, power, advocacy, technique | THATCamp CHNM 2011

ethics, power, advocacy, technique | THATCamp CHNM 2011 — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:19:17 +0000

[…] the more hacking front, and following on Patrick Murray-John’s offer for a session on humanities coding/hacking, I’d love a session that shares modules/libraries most useful to […]

By: briancroxall

briancroxall — Tue, 31 May 2011 20:19:11 +0000

I’m going to vote for the “Thinking Like a Hacker” session (as I think I was one of the people begging for its reprise). It’s something that I’m trying to learn more about. Working on something concrete like a GM script would be fabulous. Or even a bookmarklet that does a simple search query for a site.

By: thowe

thowe — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:00:49 +0000

I, too, am definitely not a coder, but I’m not even sure I’d call myself a hacker! I do the cut-and-paste thing, the cobbling-together thing, and the ask-people-for-help thing, but I can’t really make things on my own. Which leads to (what may or may not be) an interesting thought–there’s a lot of discourse out there how traditional humanities scholars are very insular and isolated (I was just rereading Terry Eagleton’s critique of modern criticism…), how collaboration in the humanities is much less developed than in the so-called hard and social sciences, how the readership for single-authored humanities scholarship festers behind paywalls (still thinking about Amanda’s #umwfa11 talk…), and so on. It seems like DH hacking provides a useful model for (or raises some interesting questions about) collaboration in traditional humanities fields–especially since we always talk about “entering the conversation.” Can we map the yacking onto the hacking, and vice versa? Has this been said before?

By: Jonathan List

Jonathan List — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:33:32 +0000

This is interesting. When I started my project a year ago, I never expected to find that there is a community of people who are very similar to me. I am hacking away at an app designed to do what I want it to do. I think that this is probably a commonality we all share: We only work on projects that we will personally benefit from. Real IT professionals often code on projects for other people, but it seems like we only code on projects that we want. I have to agree with wragge in that I only learn things as I need them, and sometimes try to learn a little bit more in order to make my stuff better.

By: Amanda French

Amanda French — Thu, 26 May 2011 04:07:38 +0000

Jeez, Tim, if you’re not a real coder, at least by humanities standards, there’s no hope for the rest of us. Heaven knows I’m not a real coder, because all I can do is cut and paste other people’s code (usually, yes, JavaScript and PHP) into the appropriate place. But I like Patrick’s definition, because clearly I’m not a coder, but a hacker. There’s so much existing code out there that I can get a heck of a lot done just by modifying stuff.

By: Session Proposal: Critical Code Studies » THATCamp CHNM 2011

Session Proposal: Critical Code Studies » THATCamp CHNM 2011 — Tue, 24 May 2011 14:59:54 +0000

[…] session proposal overlaps with Patrick’s idea for a humanities coding session, but it’s different enough that I thought it might warrant its own session. Whereas Patrick […]

By: Mark Sample

Mark Sample — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:47:48 +0000

I really like these session ideas. The first one in particular comes close to a Critical Code Studies session I was going to propose. I may still propose the idea, because it would approach the idea of code from a slightly different angle—i.e. less from a coder/hacker angle and more from a media studies perspective. There would still be a great deal of overlap, though, and I can envision the Critical Code Studies session acting as a kind of warm-up for a Humanities Coder session.

By: Patrick Murray-John

Patrick Murray-John — Mon, 23 May 2011 12:52:56 +0000

Great idea about doing some Greasemonkeying. Part of “hacking” as opposed to “coding”, I think, is that hacking starts with existing, functioning code and you figure out how to insert yourself into it to make it do what you want. A GM script, or maybe several, would do that well, and maybe even offer some scaffolding to bigger coding/hacking concepts, finishing up with a new GM script to modify, say, the THATCamp site?

That might be a bit much, though!

By: wragge

wragge — Sun, 22 May 2011 01:48:03 +0000

Both sound good to me!

On the yack side, one thing I always grapple with is the feeling that I’m not a ‘real’ coder, mainly because I’ve operated on the basis of learning what I need when I need it and don’t feel I’ve paid enough attention to best practices. I know it’s not very productive or useful thing to worry about, but I find it hard to shake. So sharing some stories about how we got into this stuff and laying out some best practices would be useful I think.

On the hack side, if you’re getting people to play with javascript, perhaps we could do some Greasemonkeying — ie. pick a site or feature that really annoys you and change it! Or pick a database or catalogue that you use a lot and write a Zotero translator for it. Both types of project would cover some basic stuff about the DOM as well as usual programming concepts.